How to Beat the Australians by Richard Beard

Author:Richard Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

Fourth Test

I would sooner die than be beaten, I hate the person that’s beaten me and I hate myself worse for being beaten, and the young get that from me.

Percy Cerutty, ABC radio archive, 1970

RUNNING IS THE humblest of recreational sports. Buy some shoes and shorts, start and finish at your own front door, and when you do get back you can trust the showers and don’t have to wash with naked strangers. Unless you’re a student, in which case your life has many other compensations as well as this one.

For that Hallmark card feeling, that stand-up cardboard reminder of Happy Birthday, Getting Married, Your First Child feeling, I can try running. It’s easier than surfing, and I don’t have to be tenacious and talented like Debbie Watson – run often and far enough and I too can have a full knee reconstruction. Nor do I have to start aged fourteen, take lessons, or pass a safety test. I can just get out there in the Australian sunshine and run.

In the Manly Daily, the paper I read every day, there’s a letter from Mr Golding, 52, who believes ‘you can get past the most incredible things by believing in yourself and being persistent’. This is today’s familiar Hollywood narrative, the liveable dream, the orthodox belief of our times. You can make it if you want to, if you want to enough.

Running is a training drill for this popular story, an exercise in self-believing and persistence. Put one foot in front of the other, but a little faster than that, and from now on running isn’t about skill but about will.

I’ve always liked running, and more so as I get older, as if I’m keen to use up my body before I die. Wouldn’t want to waste it. I’m also getting close to the age where many men decide they need to run a marathon. There’s no clearer cry for help from the onset of a midlife crisis – one last crippling hurrah. The light is dying, and months of pounding and sweating might reverse the decision, might delay the dimmer switch on the dying of the light.

Fringe benefits include getting out of the house and then, unlike other sports, avoiding meaningful human contact. It’s a brief inner trip to the wilderness, and it’s surprising that Patrick White, novelist of the great Australian interior, couldn’t understand this. He was no great fan of sport, believing his fellow Australians indulged a ‘passion for perpetual motion, perhaps for fear that we may have to sit down and face reality if we don’t keep going’.

Well, quite. That’s the attraction, and only Nobel laureates in fiction can unflinchingly face the possibility of too much reality. Like Voss, White’s tragic heroic explorer, the runner discovers ‘how much less destructive of the personality are thirst, fever, physical exhaustion, much less destructive than people’. But to discover this in running, White would have had to get involved.

So on with the moon-shoes and out on the road. Alone in Manly, free to make it up as I go along, running is like hitting a tennis ball against a wall.

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